Friday, April 16, 2004

Thursday, April 15, 2004

The latest tinfoil-hat conspiracy story running around is that the US
is not only planting weapons of mass destruction in Iraq now, but has
deliberately stirred up the current unrest as
a cover for that activity.
There are problems with that story. If they're going to plant
weapons at all, why do it now, after multiple teams of
U.S.-endorsed experts have already scoured the country and found it
clean? And it also implies an unhealthy willingness to spill Iraqi
blood in large amounts for the sake of nothing more than cheap
propaganda points. So at first glance, at least, this is not a very
likely story.

And you could say the same for lots of conspiracy theories of the
past. Take the "domino theory" -- that the North Vietnamese
Communists were the spearhead of a grand plan of the Chinese and
Russian leaderships combined to convert the entire Indo-Chinese
peninsula to Communist rule. But the North Vietnamese government were
fundamentally nationalist autocrats, with a little Communist veneer, who were
actually playing China and Russia off against each other, and didn't
have much interest in spreading Communism past their borders. The
only other domino that fell was Cambodia, and that because we had
destablized it with our own bombing campaigns. What's more, when the
Khmer Rouge regime there got to be too much to take, it was the North
Vietnamese who chased it out (and the U.S. actually supported
the Khmer Rouge in the subsequent diplomatic byplay -- I never
understood why, unless it was just spite). So we can now say for
certain that that was a crock. But for years, people at the highest
levels of our government believed it.

They believed it because it was, at least superficially, credible.
It was credible because these things are sometimes true -- as in
Iran-Contra, where we really did sell arms to the Iranians, violating
our own declared embargo, in order to use the proceeds to fund
guerillas trying to overthrow governments that a Republican
administration didn't like in Central America, violating yet another
ban on arms trafficing imposed by Congress. Or, even more to the
point, the Communist plan to infiltrate spies into sensitive areas of
our government (remember Klaus
Fuchs?), and establish puppet regimes all over Europe (they'd
already done it in the east).

So, let's consider the conspiracy now uppermost in the minds of
Americans -- Osama bin Laden's conspiracy to topple governments
throughout the Muslim world, and replace them with a caliphate which
endorses more or less his own style of theocracy (of which the Afghan
Taliban can be considered a kind of preview).

Now, it's an error to assume that all religious Muslim radicals are
necessarily part of the same grand scheme -- the religious disputes
between, say, the terrorist-sponsoring Shiite theocrats of Iran and
the extreme Sunni leadership of al-Qaeda matter a great deal more to
them than they do to us. However, you really can't understand what's
going on in one local scene there without looking at action over the
borders. Fighters are sometimes recruited in one place for action
somewhere else (as when we recruited a certain young Saudi to help us
kick Communists out of Afghanistan). And if nothing else, atrocities
in one place may wind up being used as propaganda points elsewhere.
Our current trouble in Fallujah, for instance, was apparently
triggered, and almost certainly worsened, by Sharon's
assassination of a Palestinian leader in the West Bank. (If you liked
that, stay tuned. There may be
more coming.)

Besides, radical Muslims of all stripes share certain interests
regardless of their own factional disputes -- which can be briefly
summarized as getting rid of us (and our friends, and our proxies).
So, even if it's oversimple to paint Osama as the sole radical Muslim
mastermind wanting to topple the relatively secular and U.S.-friendly
dominos governments now in power throughout much of
dar el-Islam, it's nevertheless the case that the establishment of a
radical regime, or a radical movement, in one place, may catalyse
action against another, in a different place.

So, taking the long view: the U.S. knocked over the
secular power in Iraq. Our leaders, such as they are, plainly had
the idea that they could replace it with the regime of their choice.
Real life is more complicated. But Iraq per se is not hugely
significant right now. Not nearly as significant in itself as what it
may portend for other Muslim states of greater significance -- say,
Saudi Arabia, or nuclear Pakistan.

Which leads to the truly crappy conclusion that we might have been
better off leaving things be -- leaving the potentially
noxious Saddam in power, on a leash, and leaving the civilians he
oppressed, and the kids dying of preventable diseases because of our
crackpot embargo on antibiotics, in the position of that kid in The Ones Who Walk Away From
Omelas. There were, after all, worse places in the Muslim world,
particularly for women. But I've been arguing that since
before the war.

Advocates of the invasion, many of them, thought they had a better
idea. But the people leading it rejected not only the plans which had
been put together with great care by the State Department, but the
whole process of planning. We will have to live with the result.

But we still have choices. And, unfortunately, the Americans broadcasting transparentlyphony whitewashes of the military action in Fallujah are choosing, by giving our enemies splendid propaganda, to make things worse -- in Iraq or elsewhere. (But they're only transparently phony to people on the scene; you wonder if their attention is more on voters in the U.S.)

More generally, a bad occupation hurts us -- more so, to be completely cold-blooded about it, than would even a civil war, where some of the blame would necessarily fall on the belligerents, and not on us. I'm not sure what motivates our invasion -- or the continued occupation. To judge from the guy currently tipped as the successor to Bremer, it's not the milk of human kindness. But hard-hearted realism ain't it either...

Which brings us back to the question of why Dubya's
crew might plant weapons now. Like I said, it doesn't strike me as the
likeliest of stories, if only because of the timing. Then again, they may have been deep enough
in their self-delusion to expect to actually find something real
before now -- and associates of the current administration, including
one now tipped as Bremer's successor, have not been
overly squeamish in the past about spilling the blood of, as
someone once said, "dark-skinned people". So, you never
know....

Late edit: I managed to post this one without the last paragraph
of the main body, which made the postscript look a bit weird; and subsequently added yet another. Ooops...

There's a quip I've heard attributed to Noam Chomsky about the first
Gulf War. When someone asked him about it, he's said to have remarked
that he didn't believe any such event had occured -- a war, he pointed
out, involves two armies fighting, and it seemed that in that instance,
one hadn't fought.

As applied to the first Gulf War, which did have a large set-piece
tank battle or two, that's just wrong. As applied to the second, I'm
not so sure. One of the enduring mysteries, at least in the public
mind, is the sheer ineffectiveness of the Iraqi military, whose elite
forces quite literally never fought. They didn't manage to even blow
up bridges in their rear as they were retreating. (I remember hearing
an explanation of that on Nightline, when Ted Koppel, in full
anti-chemical regalia, explained with great solemnity that we had
air-dropped laser-guided bombs, targeted precisely enough to clip the
wires going to the detonators. Someone probably earned a case of beer
from his buddies for getting Koppel to believe that). But the mystery
cleared up at least a little bit later, when it came out that key
Iraqi commanders had
been bought off to not fight.

Fast forward to now, nearly a year after Bremer summarily fired the
entire Iraqi military, when our forces are being subjected to a
massive campaign of, among other things, harassing our supply lines by
blowing
up bridges.

The massive urban meat-grinder battle which many had feared going
into the war never happened. Or at least, it hasn't happened yet.
Let's hope it was avoided, and not merely postponed.

Further note: Chad Orzel suggests in email that Chomsky may have
cribbed the line from the stand-up act of Bill Hicks...

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

"We are pleasantly surprised at the progress on the political front," Senor said, citing Iraq's new interim constitution. After detailing what he said was political progress in the country, he acknowledged that "there is no doubt the security situation is a problem."

As Senor spoke, a mortar round landed near the former Sheraton hotel, which houses many Westerners, at the edge of Firdos Square. Explosions continued in central Baghdad through the early morning.

Google is in the news, and not in a good way: the top result for "Jew" on a Google search is now an anti-semitic hate site, but Google refuses to change it, saying "the objectivity of our ranking function prevents us from making any changes."

The objectivity of their ranking function does have its limits though -- as a company called SearchKing found out. They were in the business of boosting clients' rank in search results, including Google's, and found rather suddenly that the Google search rank of all their clients' web pages had suddenly dropped to near-invisible. Suspecting deliberate action on the part of Google, they sued -- and rather than deny it, Google claimed instead that they had a perfect right to rank documents any way they liked. The judge agreed, and the case was dismissed.

By the way, Google owns Blogger and Blogspot, and at least three Google searches were conducted in the course of preparing this blog entry. Incidentally, Google is also coming under fire for its upcoming email offering. Some of the complaints, particularly about the privacy policy, may be legitimate -- I haven't checked. But some nimrod in the California legislature is whining about ads in the email, and that is, as Rafe Colburn explains, utterly bogus...

A little news from Boston: sports talk radio here is still spitting blood over the booing of the American national anthem at a hockey playoff game in Montreal a couple of days ago. Anent which, one caller phoned in and reported in high dudgeon that the lyrics, as posted on the scoreboard at an earlier Montreal Canadiens game, had a question mark after "home of the brave".

But the scandal goes further. If you visit the Library of Congress web site, and read the first verse in Francis Scott Key's own handwriting -- all that's usually performed at sports games -- you will find that it ends in a question mark. And for no better reason than that the verse itself ends in a question.

Sunday, April 11, 2004

A few months ago, I was cynical enough to suggest that if our
occupation wasn't actually achieving much on the ground, as it didn't
seem (by neutral reports) to be, then our best strategy might be to simply
withdraw to minimize the blood on our own hands.

Comes now this week, with the rival factions crystallizing into a
coordinated opposition against us, and the best, brightest, most
committed, most compassionate soldier we could ever have would still
find himself, as Jim Henley says,

hitched to an engine called circumstance dragging him down
a hard black road to a destination labeled GROZNY, and he will claw at
the pavement the whole way there trying to slow his progress and in
the end he will get there anyway, because the outskirts are visible
already: "artillery was brought in for the first time."

The question from some war proponents of the beginning was this:
why wouldn't we choose to establish a beacon of democracy at
the heart of the Arab world, so that all other peoples and states in
the region would follow its lead? I never understood why they were so
sure we'd be able to do that -- nor, for that matter, why they thought
anyone else in the Arab world would
follow its lead.

But in the event, we seem to have blown it. We have a Governing
Council which is referred to routinely, even by the sort of liberated
women who ought to be our natural supporters, as "the puppet council",
and even they are starting to resign when confronted with our latest
attacks. On which Col. Lounsbury has a quip
which is worth a treatise:

One's pimpdom is over when your own whores don't want to be seen with you.

So, a few months ago, we had two clear options: withdrawal, or
continued occupation. (Imagine "third way"s all you like, you still
must choose: take troops out or leave them in). Now, we have two
clear options: withdrawal, or bloody battles to put down the
insurrection -- after which, the cities conquered, we would -- what?
hand them back? Well, that's what we say we're going to do.

In which connection, it's worth thinking a bit about what the
"beacon of democracy" was supposed to achieve. At the very least, it
was supposed to show the world that we were not the brutal, sadistic
conquerors of bin Laden's propaganda. And yet, looking at the
pictures of "collateral damage" which have been saturating al-Jazeera
since we went in, we seem to be showing them that's what we are. And
there may be a touch of propaganda to it, but we would be unwise to
dwell on that -- they're a news organization, and this stuff is
certainly news. (Though, speaking of selection bias, check out this
framing
of the issue, from a Centcom spokesman:

I think it's important, Rush, to keep in mind well over
95% of the country is at peace, returning to normalcy, and the
population is really just trying to get back to life. They want to
improve their socioeconomic status, they want to exercise their new
rights. I mean that sort of stuff doesn't get enough attention, and
it's so important because the rights that these people are exercising
now are unheard of in this part of world, and that's the snapshot you
get as you travel across the country.

Sure, 95% of the country is at peace. It's just the cities that
are going up. Most of the country is empty desert).

Reality check: everybody on the planet knows that we could, if we
chose, start playing by Hama rules. Diego
Garcia isn't going anywhere, and B-52s can still fly out of it. And
if we do, or just as much if we engage in a full-scale urban battle,
running the population through a meat grinder while not even letting
them escape (we aren't,
if they include military aged males -- do we want them to keep
shooting at us?), we will have proven that we are the kind of
people who do that.

Which, anon, a few of us seem to be -- we've got a New York Post
columnist here
calling for the whole neighborhoods to be pulverized by B-52s, and a
letter to the editor here
calling for the firebombing of Fallujah. The first would be an
atrocity to at least rival 9/11; the second would beggar it. And then
there's Senator Trent Lott, who wanted to just
mow the whole place down months ago.

If we withdraw though, the hawks say, we look weak. That will
certainly be what bin Laden and Co. will say -- it's his best line,
under the circumstances. But if we stay in, following anything like
our current policies, he'll say we're butchers. He's got a great
line, either way. So, if you're pondering which of these things you'd
prefer to see in Osama's next recruiting tape, please consider that
one of these alternatives does not involve American kids getting blown
up.

One final note: It's not as if I think withdrawal is a great
option. It sucks. I'd love to see a better one. But continuation of
the current policy under the current leadership ain't that. Nearly a
year ago, they were telling us that resistance was the dying embers of
the Baathist regime. I'm not sure they were ever right about that,
but regardless, rather than snuff them out, they've fanned the flames
to the point where they threaten to consume the country. A UN
transitional regime under European leadership, with a strong Arab
presence for day-to-day security in the cities might yet have a
chance, if it had friends among the Iraqi leadership -- Sistani is a
theocrat, to be sure, but he's got enough human decency to not want a
civil war, which is the only reason we went as long as we did without
an uprising. And it would be a face-saving way out for us. But I
have a hard time seeing Dubya's crowd agreeing to that unless their
sweetheart deals for Halliburton were preserved up front. They have
their priorities.

But the longer we go without some kind of change, the more we just
compound the damage. Our hawks keep saying that bad as Iraq is, it's
no Vietnam. After a year, neither was Vietnam. If we keep screwing
up long enough, though, then fifty years on, someone's going to be
saying that as bad as we blew it in Vietnam, it was still no Iraq.

Update: As I was writing this, occupation leadership was
having second thoughts; for the moment, at least, they're trying to
negotiate with the insurgents. See survey posts by Juan Cole
and Billmon. If the negotiations succeed,
maybe we can find a way to get out without a bloodbath first. But as both point out, any success
will be a significant climbdown by Bremer's crowd. Muqtada al-Sadr is hardly likely to passively
agree to submit to arrest by coalition authorities. So what happens to that warrant? And of course,
poor follow-through from the American side, or worse, perceived insincerity, lands us right back
in the soup...

Further update: According to this Reuters report, our military staff isn't yet entirely clear on the whole "negotiation" concept. Via Atrios...

More folks on the right are suggesting that if there's another
terrorist attack, we should cancel or postpone the election. Because
you wouldn't want issues forcefully brought to peoples' attention
while they were casting their votes, or anything.

It's a notion of small-d democratic politics in which the purpose
of an election is to allow a passive, unruffled people to ratify
choices which have already been basically made for them -- a
perspective that shines through in this headline
of the week:

Politics Can Get in the Way of Keeping Papers Secret

Secrecy is the normal state of affairs. Politics is an imposition.

(Which is also the kind of democracy they're trying to bring to
Iraq -- the Iraqis will be allowed to elect Chalabi, once all the
leaders who have actually been living in Iraq have been coopted,
bought off, or suppressed).

Lincoln held an election in the middle of the Civil War, against a
candidate who was openly calling for an armistice that would have left
secession as a fait accompli.

So, Condi Rice's claim that "we didn't know" now boils down to saying
that the August 6
PDB did not mention hijacked airliners being used as
missiles. It just talked about the immediate near-term
possibility of hijacking, or maybe something involving a building.

So, if they had clear information about imminent use of
airliners as missiles, that would have justified immediate
drastic action. But if it's just plain old hijacking -- well, there's
no need to disturb anyone's scheduled vacation for that.

Note also the comments on this thread from
Billmon, which points out that this one released text may not be
the whole story; some even question whether they released the whole
document...